Seeking Spirits: The Lost Cases of The Atlantic Paranormal Society

SEEKING SPIRITS

DON’T MISS JASON AND GRANT’S

FIRST COLLECTION

OF GHOSTLY ADVENTURES...

Ghost Hunting

True Stories of Unexplained Phenomena from

The Atlantic Paranormal Society

Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson with Michael Jan Friedman

Available from Pocket Books!

SEEKING SPIRITS

The Lost Cases of The Atlantic Paranormal Society

JASON HAWES AND GRANT WILSON WITH MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN

Pocket Books

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 2009 by Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson, and Michael Jan Friedman

GHOST HUNTERS ® is a registered trademark and service mark of Pilgrim Films and Television, Inc. in the United States and foreign countries. The GHOST HUNTERS logo © 2004 by Pilgrim Films and Television, Inc. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Pocket Books trade paperback edition September 2009.

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

   Hawes, Jason

      Seeking spirits / by Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson with Michael Jan Friedman.—1st Pocket Books trade pbk. ed.

        p. cm.

    1. Ghosts. 2. Parapsychology. 3. Atlantic Paranormal Society.

I. Wilson, Grant. II. Friedman, Michael Jan. III. Atlantic Paranormal Society. IV. Title.

BF1461.S378 2009 133.1—dc22

                      2009025000

ISBN 978-1-4391-0115-5

ISBN 978-1-4391-5539-4 (ebook)

I dedicate this book and all of my work firstly to my wife, Kristen, who has given me the strength when I was down to stand on my feet again. I love you not just as my wife but as my best friend since the seventh grade.

Secondly, I dedicate this book to all five of my children, who have endured their father’s passion and allowed me the time to do everything I have accomplished. You all keep me young and have showed me how important every moment we spend together is. Our time together is priceless.

Last and not least, I dedicate this book to every T.A.P.S. family and non-T.A.P.S. family paranormal investigator out there. Your work has helped push this field into a respectable position. Your support is what has made us a success.

—Jason Hawes

I dedicate this book to the hundreds of thousands of paranormal investigators who work tirelessly, dedicating countless hours, hard earned money, and much needed sleep in order to help those who are afraid in their own homes, and to those who are blazing new trails in the field despite pathetic ridicule and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Thank you for your hard work.

And, of course, to my loving wife and children, ever-present and unwavering in their crescendoing love, support, and importance in my life.

—Grant Wilson

Paranormal activity is not supported by conventional scientists or by specialized equipment manufacturers, nor can it be re-created in a controlled setting. Therefore the field of paranormal investigation is populated by theory, speculation, and opinion. Due to these limitations, what is shared within these pages is what T.A.P.S. as an organization feels is closest to the truth. T.A.P.S. is not claiming these beliefs to be fact; rather, they are presented as educated theories and observations based on years of experience and research.

Introduction by Grant Wilson

The Cases by Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson

Conclusion by Jason Hawes

Glossary

Ghost hunting, like a lot of other things we human beings do, has gotten a lot more sophisticated over the years, a lot more technological in nature, and a lot more demanding. If you’re going to conduct a paranormal investigation in a professional manner, you need to be savvy in any number of specialized applications. That’s why it makes sense for you to have access to a team of experts.

When you see Jason and me on television these days, we’ve usually got a fair-sized crew working with us. It’s a darned capable crew, too. You know them because you’ve seen them as often as you’ve seen Jason and me.

On Ghost Hunters, these people are fielding calls from prospective clients, loading up vehicles, and driving from one end of the country to the other. They’re interviewing, setting up our equipment, and serving as our eyes and ears in various aspects of our investigations. They’re packing up in the morning, spending long hours reviewing audio and video data, and conducting research in local libraries, town halls, and historical societies. And when the investigation’s over, they’re filing away the evidence we’ve collected so it’s available for future reference.

But it wasn’t always that way. Back in the day, when T.A.P.S. was just getting started, Jason and I did a lot of that stuff on our own. We didn’t have a big organization to fall back on. We were just two guys with a passion for ghost-hunting and a naïve notion that we could help people in trouble.

Sure, we had some welcome assistance. We were seldom left completely to our own devices. But it was often just the two of us, relying only on ourselves and on each other, because there was no one else we could drag out of bed on a Saturday morning to make a six-hour drive up to Maine.

After all, paranormal investigation isn’t just a hobby, though we know there are people who look at it that way. It’s a responsibility, and a big one. When you’re a ghost hunter, you’re dealing with people’s lives. You’re entering their homes, listening to their most closely guarded secrets, going through their personal possessions, and maybe offering them a sliver of hope.

They might not place much faith in their clergy, their doctors, or their local police force. They might not feel comfortable confiding in their friends, their neighbors, or even the other members of their family. But for some reason, they feel comfortable placing their faith in you. If that’s not a responsibility, I don’t know what is.

One of the reasons people depend on us, I think, is that we’ve been where they are. We’ve had our close encounters with the supernatural, been scared half to death by them, and been lucky enough to come out whole and sane. So when we sit down to talk with a woman who sees things other people don’t see, or a man who hears voices late at night, we can appreciate their confusion and their pain.

We can identify.

If you read our first book, Ghost Hunting, you know how Jason first came into contact with the supernatural. At the tender age of twenty, he got involved with a woman who practiced Reiki, a Japanese relaxation technique that depends on the manipulation of a person’s life-force energy. After six months of exposure to the technique, he started seeing things—including full-body human apparitions.

He thought he was losing his mind. Then he was introduced to a paranormal researcher named John Zaffis, who told him he was just becoming sensitive to paranormal phenomena. That settled Jason’s mind, but he was still seeing things everywhere he went. It wasn’t until he ran into a stranger at an aquarium—a woman who suggested that he try eating green olives—that he obtained any relief from his visions.

Olives. Go figure.

In the meantime, Jason had founded R.I.P.S.—the Rhode Island Paranormal Society—a support group for people like him, who had had an encounter with the paranormal and felt the need to talk about it. It was through R.I.P.S. that Jason and I met. I was looking to establish some credentials in the field of website design, came across the R.I.P.S. website, and knew I could improve it a couple of hundred percent.

I contacted Jason and discovered that he was interested in improving the site, and could use the help. A short time later, we met at a doughnut shop and started batting around ideas. But the conversation kept drifting away from websites and toward the paranormal.

We had that interest in common, and we talked about it not only on that night but on many others as well. However, it wasn’t until years later, after we had become as close as brothers, that I finally confided in Jason what had happened to me. Because, you see, he wasn’t the only one who’d had an experience he couldn’t explain. And here, more or less, is the story I told him . . .

I grew up in a densely wooded part of Rhode Island, the paranormal being the furthest thing from my mind. It came up in the form of Halloween and ghost stories, and that was about it. Besides, I wasn’t the kind of kid who liked to explore dark, drafty attics and cold, cobwebbed basements, looking for the spirits of the departed. I spent all my free time outdoors, which was why I joined the Boy Scouts and then later on the Eagle Scouts. If you blindfolded me and put me in the woods in those days, I had no trouble finding my way home.

I have a very close friend whom I’ve known since I was five years old, whose name is Chris. One day, when I was fifteen, we were hanging out in the woods near Chris’s house, climbing trees and doing the kind of stuff we always did in the woods. Suddenly, we got an odd feeling that we should probably go home. I can’t tell you where it came from, but we both felt it.

It was then that I noticed something moving among the trees. It wasn’t an animal, or anything even vaguely resembling an animal, and it certainly wasn’t a human being. It was some kind of distortion in the air, weaving its way through the branches.

I pointed it out to Chris, expecting that he would see it, too. To my surprise, he didn’t . He could see the effect the thing had on the tree branches, moving them aside as it went, but not the thing itself. After about a half hour of this, the phenomenon left us, and we stood there bewildered.

What was that? I asked.

Neither of us had an answer.

Of course, we went back to that spot the next day, and the day after that, and many times thereafter. Every time, something happened that we couldn’t explain. It was scary in a way because we were dealing with something way outside the realm of our experience. But we never felt that we were in danger. Whatever we had stumbled on, it didn’t seem like it was out to hurt us.

Finally, the presence revealed itself—but only to me. Chris could see the results of its actions—the dust, the moving branches, and so on—but not the thing that had moved them. For some reason I didn’t understand, I was the only one who could catch even a glimpse of our strange companion.

What did it look like? It was short and dark. And from all appearances, very, very curious. In fact, it seemed to want to know about us every bit as much as we wanted to know about it. It wasn’t what you would call friendly. But then, it wasn’t shy or nasty or frightened either. It was just . . . fascinated with us.

I looked the thing up in every book I could find, but I still couldn’t figure out what it might be. I remember being afraid that it would go away and we would never know what we had discovered. But it didn’t go anywhere. Every time we returned to the woods, it was there, waiting for us.

We were able to interact with this thing—this entity— quite regularly over the course of the next two years. It occurred to us that we should run some tests to verify its existence, to prove, if only to ourselves, that we weren’t crazy. In particular, since I was the only one who could see the entity, to prove that I wasn’t crazy.

One day the entity decided to mimic my friend Chris. Once I realized what it was doing, I saw my chance to conduct a test. First I stood between Chris and the sun, so I couldn’t catch a glimpse of Chris’s shadow and spoil the experiment. Then I asked Chris to stand behind me and make a series of unusual gestures, gestures I had never seen him make before.

I couldn’t see Chris, but I could see the entity as it imitated him. Watching it carefully, I described to my friend what I was seeing. Then I asked Chris to tell me if he was doing the same thing.

He was. Exactly.

We kept at it for about an hour, and I managed to describe Chris’s gestures—no matter how elaborate they got—without a single error. The entity then headed back into the woods. Once again, we were left dumbfounded that such a thing existed, albeit a little more confident that we weren’t out of our minds.

We later found that we could ask the entity to be in certain places at certain times—and I’m not just talking about places in the woods. It would show up in town as well. And each time we asked it to show up at a certain location, we would hear of some evidence that it had been there. Not that it had been spotted—I was the only one who could see it—but that something had occurred that wouldn’t have happened if the entity hadn’t been there.

For example, one time we asked it to be on my friend’s school bus in the morning. When my friend got on the bus the next day, which was a Monday, everyone was sitting in the front half of the vehicle rather than the back, even though the back of the bus was where most kids liked to gather. On Tuesday morning, after the entity was gone, a bunch of kids were seated in the back again.

We conducted similar tests on several different occasions. Each time, the entity’s presence caused a change in people’s behavior. No one saw it, but they reacted to it all the same.

It all ended when I went away to college. The entity remained in the woods, as far as I knew. Of course, I missed it. Because I was the only one who could see it, I had felt a certain bond with it. But there were other things happening in my life. They distracted me from thinking a lot about the short, dark thing in the woods.

Then, as luck would have it, I moved back to the area where I grew up. Of course, I had never stopped thinking about the entity, wondering if it still visited the spot where I first encountered it. Believe me, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it decided not to appear again.

I went back to the old spot several times and walked around for a while. If nothing happened, I thought, so be it. But I wasn’t there more than a few minutes before I saw something moving through the trees. And as I watched, amazed, the entity appeared again.

As before, I could see it. I could communicate with it. And it was still curious enough about human beings to renew our relationship, which I still prize to this day.

Is it a ghost? A demon? I have my own reasons for saying no in answer to these questions. I have consulted with many so-called experts in the paranormal about my encounters with the entity in the woods, and none of them pretend to have an idea what it could be.

I have spent my life, since the age of fifteen, trying to explain or even just categorize what I have experienced. All I can tell you is that it has been a wonderful part of my life. Far from being frightened or freaked out by it, I feel profoundly grateful for it.

Of course, what I’ve described here is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There are many more parts to the story. But those are for another day . . . if I decide it’s a good idea to discuss them at all.

You see, this is the first time I’ve spoken publicly about my first experiences with the paranormal. Until now, I’ve kept mum on the subject. No doubt, you’re asking yourself why I remained silent for so long.

For one thing, I’ve always considered my personal experiences just that—personal. In other words, a matter between me and the small, dedicated group of friends who saw me through those times. For another thing, I didn’t want anyone to think I was just trying to get attention. If you know me, you know attention is the last thing I want. I would much rather stand on the sidelines than in the limelight.

Finally, I couldn’t stand the idea that people would try to pick apart what happened to me. It was difficult enough to deal with the reality of my encounters. I didn’t need the additional burden of trying to prove their authenticity.

Even now, I feel a little uncomfortable talking about it. But for better or worse, it’s out there. You decide if you want to believe it.

Anyway, that’s how it all began for me. You know where it wound up—with our starting T.A.P.S., also known as The Atlantic Paranormal Society, and crawling on our hands and knees through places most people would prefer to avoid, in search of things few people want to know about. And maybe because we’re crazy by nature, loving every minute of it.

Even the scary parts. Or maybe I should say especially the scary parts.

Like when a table scrapes its way across the floor for no good reason, or when you’re playing back an audio recording and you hear a whisper warning you to get out, or when you see a human-looking shadow gather in the corner of a room and you know there’s no one there to cast it. Or maybe you record a sudden drop in temperature as if all the heat is being sucked out of the room, or you feel something heavy sitting on your chest, and you can’t begin to explain what’s happening in terms of normal, everyday physics.

Jason and I have had a lifetime’s worth of those moments. And, of course, only some of them took place after we started appearing on television. We conducted many of our most bizarre investigations long before we had any idea there would be a Ghost Hunters program on Syfy.

You read about some of those cases in Ghost Hunting. For instance, the investigation in which a family was visited by apparitions without legs. Or the one in which I was attacked by an angry spirit in a barn. Or the one in which a church was haunted by the ghosts of Civil War soldiers. Those stories struck a chord with you, and you told us you wanted to hear more of them.

That’s why we put together this second volume of our adventures as paranormal investigators. Because our television investigations, exciting and intriguing as they may be, can only give you part of the story. The remainder of it is composed of the untold cases that follow.

As you read them, remember—back then we weren’t as experienced in the paranormal field as we are now. A lot of times we were feeling our way around and hoping for the best. But then, everybody’s got to start somewhere . . .